Building a modified Coral Noosa 279 - We're In

Hey thattime, how was the move? All settled in? Got some more pics for us?

Hi Wizard! It's been a while since I checked in.

Thinking back to the move... it was ok. We were let down by our driveway guys and I had to move the things that were coming in from the front over some duckboards I put over the mud of the front yard. It took a while but I got there. Luckily we had our largest items stored in the shed I built in the back yard, so they came in a lot easier and I had some hired help there.

Inside the house is a pleasure. I installed the fireplace and knocked over the data cabling in the first few weeks in. We had a few visits from various parties early in the peace to finish off some outstanding items - a few power points, fixed (reconnected) the smoke detectors, put up last of the towel rails, tidy up some painting, redo some edge strips on our flooring.

Then our son, Sean, was born and progress around the house came to a bit of a halt. Between some bad weather, bad health on my part (though nothing serious) and some average finances I'm afraid to say our yards are still in an "original state". That's really bugging me but we have to pick priorities.

We had a security scare recently with someone trying to get into the house early one morning. They smashed a window but didn't get in so, apart from the scare, it was a lesson for us to improve some things. We'll be doing an all round installation of security doors and window covers in the next week or so. We're going with a product called Invisi-Gard which is a coated stainless steel mesh - it looks like a heavy fly screen. It's very easy on the eyes... but not so nice on the hip pocket. So... the yards will have to wait a bit longer.

Overall, life is good and it's great to be in our home. It's a bit surreal at first and does take some getting used to. We've had some people come to stay with us a few times and it's great to have space for everyone.

As for pics... I'll get some together soon. I just want to tidy up a few rooms and it'll be nice to show the finished product of the security doors.

I hope all is well there.

Well you've certainly had an action packed few months! Congratulations on the birth of your bub, how exciting, new house and a baby to christen it Not so good to hear about the security scare, that would have been frightening at the time I'm very curious to see how the invisi-gard looks, have seen the ads, but not seen it on anyone's house that I know of. Pity about the old hip pocket, I know the feeling and we haven't even finished the build! Paying rent plus mortgage is a killer!! Glad to hear it's all going well and you're happy in your beautiful house! Definitely looking forward to those pics now

congrats on the new bub and moving in

Cheers for the great thread, it was an awesome read.
You house looks brilliant.

thattime
I wish I have found your thread before... We are in the process to build a modified version of the Noosa 279 too and at the moment we have been finalising the tender.
Please check below the update we have made so far. Will spend the next few days reading your posts. Thanks for sharing your experience.
http://s903.photobucket.com/user/sukarabikun/media/FloorPlanNoosa279_zpsdaf30ecf.jpg.html

Hi! Well, it's not too late! But I wouldn't talk you out of the Noosa or Coral.

I like what you've done with that big Alfresco with the sliding doors opening to it. That deep edge beam - ouch.

I'm in two minds about our Alfresco lately - I'm tempted just to leave it as is because apart from a sandpit for our daughter we've barely used it since we've moved in. But I feel the space would be more useful and would get us out there more often if it was larger. For our design that will mean a L shaped deck from the Alfresco door going around to the Laundry door... and then some type of a roof over it. That plan is winning me over.

About building, I'm not sure where you're coming from experience wise but I'll say this - regardless of the builder and the product everyone's experience with building will be slightly different. I wanted this thread to be a warts-and-all account of what happened and when, depending on your perspective and appetite some aspects of our build might worry you when you read them. But today as we stand in the house I'm very happy with the final product and with Coral Homes. There have been some frustrations but overall I really liked the building process and I would love like to do it again - if I could have several houses .

Thanks Nully.

Thanks 1rocky!

I love that view over the pool you guys have got, and your gardens are looking great. Excellent work.

thattime
Thanks for your response. Our Sale Consultant told us that the drop edge beam may not be necessary but I insisted to keep it into the tender until the private certifier decision. Then I'm not going to have a heart attack.
I agree with your last comment and hope that we can end up enjoying our house as you have been enjoying yours.

Hi,
I've got a couple of questions about the data cabling if you don't mind.
Have you used the pre-punched holes to run all of your cables or did you punch some additional ones?
I believe you did your cabling after the sparky did his own cabling job in order not to interfere, didn't you.
Did you also use stud plates screwed on the frame at the end of each cables?
And finally, I don't really understand the goal of installing 12 duct pipes, are they for future cabling?
Thanks for your time, are you enjoying your new house?

Hi! No, I don't mind. I'm sorry that I don't check in on the forum very often these days and missed your questions.


I used the pre-punched holes in all but one location. That one location was a very short bit of wall (just to the right of the internal garage door, looking from lounge room) that didn't have any pre-punched holes. I had to drill 2x small holes there, no biggie.

Note that on external walls you don't usually use the frame holes at all as the cables run down the gap between the frame and brick work. I followed my electricians lead on that.

We were lucky that we ended up with an extra bag of hole grommets during the build so I had plenty to use for my purposes. Otherwise the electrician and plumbers will use just about all the grommets to do their thing.


Note that it's illegal in some states for unlicensed persons to do data cabling. So, no, I didn't do anything at all!

But if we were to speculate about an alternate universe where these things were possible then, yes, I would have done all the post rough-in cabling work after the build finished.


No. I didn't see the need for them, and doing that would have resulted in wall plates in locations I didn't exactly want. All the wall plates that were installed (both data and power) just have the usual Clipsal plaster brackets behind them - that's enough to fit them tightly against the wall.

Honestly it was one of those "Do it while I can" ideas. Apart from two ducts I put in the lounge room walls I'm not sure if I'll ever use them... but they're there.

The idea came from another forum and is based on the logic that you can't easy run cables down walls on steel framed houses. So adding the ducts in strategic locations gives a nice, easy roof to floor path through a wall to get future cables up and down for any reason.

But I've since found that it's possible to get cables through walls without things like ducts in place. Firstly, you can easily run cables down to the top half of any wall, before the cable hits the noggins. Though that might result in the cable terminating far too high on the wall for most functions/tastes.

You can also get a cable down the full length of the wall if there's an existing cable already there - for power, data etc. In that case the licensed person performing the work would need to make the cable safe by disconnecting the power, and wrapping it with insulating tape etc. Then they'd attach something like a strong string to the cable - I've seen whipper snipper type cord used to great success - and pull the cable up into the roof space. Then it's a matter of attaching the new cable to the existing cable, and pulling the joined cables back down the wall using the string/cord/wire etc. It's risky because you may end up with a cable pulled up that you can't get back down... but if the person wraps things tightly and pulls the cable slowly there should be a minimum of trouble.

It helps to know your house before you attempt that kind of thing. I know some of our frame holes are wedged with electrical cables and I'd never try that procedure on any of those.

What I also found is you can run cable down the wall if you happen to be doing that near a stud. All the steel components in the wall, including the studs, are shaped like a C. So you can push the cable along the inside of the stud all the way down.

Back to ducts - I've got two ducts in the lounge room wall that I know will be used from time to time. What I'm planning to do there is have the TV in the usual place - middle of the wall - but have any theatre appliances on shelves off to the side of the wall in the corner. So at a minimum there'll be a need to get a long HDMI cable from the appliances over to the TV and that cable will change over time as they keep changing the display and cable techs on us. The next big thing will likely be 4K TVs which will need a newer HDMI cable (v1.4+) or possibly even DisplayPort. Having the ducts there will allow a very neat and easy path for the cable.

What I've got on the wall over the ducts in those two locations (well, just one so far) are these brush type wall plates.

They look ok.

Two tools that I've got now that I'd say are nearly essential for pulling cables in walls are a simpler yellow tongue type plastic strip, and some push rods. They've both been very useful at times and I suspect with a bit of patient "tapping" from the roof space downwards you could use the push rods to find the hole in the noggin and get a cable path through a wall.

Yes, we're really enjoying it. I often look at it from the point of view of our children - it's just really good having neat, open spaces for them to play in, or crawl around in. We've got plenty of room for all their toys... so far , and we've got different rooms we can go to if one is sleeping but we want to pop on a Disney movie for the other. It's quite a priviledge and we're lucky really. I'm very appreciative of it.

Me personally... well I'm digging a bit in the dirt lately to put down some drainage and, you guessed it, some cabling. It has it's moments.

How are you progressing?

Catching up on some recent action...

Since we moved into the house I was watching our power bills and they were just too high. We've got a 4kW solar system on the roof and it wasn't making an impact on the bills. We were getting bills in the order of $750/quarter - just too much considering the power we were generating.

The first thing I did to address things was to ditch Origin Energy as our retailer. I had to deal with them a few times for all manner of billing matters and their customer service just stinks. Then there's the fact they don't pay a cent as a solar Feed-In-Tariff... and they're gone.

We're with AGL now who pay an 8c/kWh feed in tariff, which is nowhere near the 60c people were getting back in the solar heydays but it's still better than nothing. I'm still not sure how this is going to show up on our bills because I don't see our meters recording solar generation per se.

Next I got our solar electrician back in to evaluate how our phases were wired up. Like most new homes nowadays our place has three-phase power. The solar system can only feed one of those phases, so I wanted to understand which of our power circuits were wired to what phase.

Unsurprisingly we found that the solar system was feeding the "B" phase and that was only benefiting a few light circuits and perhaps one power circuit which we rarely used. So we were getting a near zero benefit from the solar power.

How that comes about is we had the solar system installed very early in our build, before any other power circuits were laid out. Then the builder's electrician did the right thing and balanced the power circuits over the different phases as he installed them - but didn't reference that to the solar feed.

So I had our solar electrician rebalance the phases, but more towards making them unbalanced. He moved the solar feed onto phase A, which is the heaviest used by our ducted air conditioning, and then moved the heavier circuits (oven, fridge, laundry, rear-of-house power) onto that phase, while moving things like light circuits onto phases B and C.

Here's how that phase balancing looks at work...

It wasn't a terribly difficult exercise and the sparky didn't charge much to do it either. I was worried that I would be paying through the nose just for him to come out and say nothing could be done. But it was a worthwhile exercise.

I can't say exactly how worthwhile it has been because we haven't had a bill since that work. But going on my own calculations we should be looking at a quarterly bill of around $520 if the feed-in-tariff doesn't work out, or mid $400's if it does. I'll look into that tariff next.

When we had the solar system installed I intentionally got a system that could be monitored. Our solar system has a Sunnyboy/SMA 4000TL inverter installed on an external wall. This inverter supports Bluetooth, so I've got a tiny PC (Raspberry Pi) with a Bluetooth adapter inside the house on the other side of that wall. The PC talks through the wall to inverter every 15 mins and pulls down all the latest numbers, and then uploads that to pvoutput.org . They do the work of generating nice graphs and making it available online. Here's what our solar output looks like for the last month or so...

You can see it's highly weather dependant. A grey raining day generates a fraction of what a strong sunny day does. Here's a graph of our best day to date...

What I like about that is we are generating in excess of 10 amps from 9am until approx 3:30pm, and most sunny days are like that. That means if we want to operate a heavy draw appliance, such as a clothes dryer, dishwasher or heater etc between those hours it's effectively "free" power... or prepaid for a few more years at least. We're not buying that power off the grid. More so, from about 7am until 6pm (in summer) we're generating enough power to cover all the lower draw devices like our computers, all the devices on standby, network devices etc.

Our power bills will be very weather dependant now. As an example when we were getting that really sunny weather before XMas it looked like our power bill would come in around $450, but the weather changed and our power usage went up as a result.

Thanks very much for your time. Always a pleasure to read your comments.

Your answer make me think that we might be in such state... So what kind of approach do you think would be the best one for someone who would still want to do his own data cabling. I mean, how would the best way, for this person, to put it when asking to the site supervisor?


It should start very soon (finger crossed). We are still dealing with different kind of variations after the color appointment and got some issues with the driveway which I finally removed from the contract.
Happy to see that your power issue is going to be fixed.

Non disclosure is king! I don't mean to put you off or worry you. As far as I understand things it is an acceptable approach to "rough in" the data cabling yourself during the build. Owner builders often do things like this even for plumbing and electrical work.

I'd recommend you talk to the trades onsite - particularly electricians and the plaster guys - to ask how best to go about laying the cables so it doesn't interfere with their work or the other infrastructure in the house.

That's as much as anyone needs to know. The sparkies will likely offer to do the work for you, but I can say no-one took issue with any of the work I proposed to do during the build.

I always sought the blessing of the site supervisor in terms of timing and any site disruption in terms of mess or storage on site. I did my best to stay out of the way of the trades too and it all ended up ok.


I think it's interesting that builders commonly offer driveways now. When we first started our search it was almost unheard of, but it always struck me as a logical thing for them to arrange.

We organised the driveway at our place and it was a bit of a drama. Quoted prices were all over the place and we had no idea how to pick a better tradie for the work. The colour has gone a bit patchy in a small number of places on our driveway now, so perhaps we could have chosen better? The driveway, path and bedroom patio slabs themselves are still absolutely solid though, no issues there.

Hi thattime,

Love your home! nice work!!!

May I ask where you have purchased your 2 x wall light??

I know it is from Germany but where exactly did you buy them from.

just love it!!

Thanks in Advance

Hi, and thanks!

Those lights are winners, I love them. This is the model:

http://www.slvlighting.com/products/wal ... -slot.aspx
(Go down to the photos, and GL 102 specs)

You will find them for sale everywhere, that whole range of lights seem to be popular the world over. I got them from eBay of all places. All up they cost us €92.82, or $121.84 AUD - for 2x lights delivered. The shops I've seen in AU sell them for $100+ each.

Just be sure to buy them from a 220/240 volt country - i.e. not from the US.

Also they're listed as Halogen lights but I've only put Halogen light bulbs in them once to test them - they were very bright. They use a light bulb spec called R7s, and note that they're 78mm long bulbs - the short version. I picked up some 6W LED bulbs from eBay and we've used them ever since. It's exactly the light level that I was trying to get out of them so I couldn't be happier all round really.

If you'd like the same bulbs just search for "R7S 78mm LED" on eBay and pick the more reputable seller... as much as we can tell. I paid $15 each for these bulbs. That's a bit more expensive because they're dimmable but you'd never want to dim them unless you're going for a real low lit, theatre experience.

Those LEDs are ugly as sin... but you can't see them anyway, and they work a treat.

WOW!!! Thanks for your kind tips.

I ended up purchasing the light as you have directed.

Thank you so much!!!!

Now I understand why I got the same feeling looking at my A&L stacking doors... Your post confirmed my feeling.
So far 30 days have gone and we are at the same stage but our registration/paperwork went through the Christmas break...
Also, we've got a new SS from today. Hope this one will last until handover.

Yeah, I still haven't changed my mind on A&L. Some of the largest windows here have 5mm glass in them for safety reasons (i.e. the ability to trip and fall through them) and these windows especially feel very heavy when opening and closing them.

But to be fair the Kitchen window with the standard thickness glass feels very light to touch and I don't mind that one at all. I just wish they all moved that easily.

After cleaning them a few times now we still have some building grime in some of the door and window tracks. If you see the same at your place I recommend you get on your SS straight away about getting them cleaned up before the dirt becomes a permanent member of your home.